The distant unknown is distrusted

From U.S. Distrust in Media Hits New High by Lymari Morales reporting the results of a recent Gallup poll.

So, from the 1970's to today trust in the media has fallen from a high of 72% to 40% and distrust has risen from 28% to 60%. If the media were a single company with a brand, these numbers would be disastrous. Actually they are disastrous any way you look at it.

A well functioning, productive society is associated with high levels of trust. For trust in the fourth estate to have fallen so sharply and steadily is not a good sign, particularly as it parallels a similar collapse in trust in politicians and institutions.

Of course the fun thing about a fact devoid of context is to juggle it around and speculate. In this instance, speculate about why there might be such a collapse.

My speculation is that the collapse of trust might be driven by three factors: 1) An increasing geographic, physical, and societal separation between media practitioners and the public, 2) A homogenization of media weltanschauung that is at odds with that of the public, and 3) Poor quality control.

Separation - As the media industry has consolidated, there are fewer and fewer employees and they are concentrated in ever fewer locations. Whereas a few decades ago 70-90% of the content of your local paper might have been generated locally by local news reporters, today 70-90% of the content is generated remotely by a news service. We tend to trust people we deal with or see are part of our community to a greater extent than we trust faceless people elsewhere.

Homogenization - America is an extraordinarily heterogeneous country with diversity of religion, ethnicity, orientation, class, income, party affiliation, ideology, education attainment, geography, etc. The media industry is dominated by a certain caricature which is grounded in reality: college level or greater education, income at or well above national average, major metropolitan location, white, secular, Democratic Party affiliated, liberal oriented, etc. The fact that the media industry is both relatively homogeneous and that that homogeneity is quite different than the rest of the country is likely a source of distrust.

Quality control - The discrepancies between what people experience and what they see reported become more transparent as the technological infrastructure enables every person to be a reporter all the time, anywhere. It is not that the media always gets it wrong, only that they are more often wrong than they wish to acknowledge and that error rate is becoming more obvious to the broader public.

There is probably more going on and each of these elements warrant a discussion but at least it is a stab at framing the conversation.